[49] Jireček, loc. cit. The Armenian influence on Bulgaria and Bosnia, and the Bogomilian influence on the West, is connected with the spread of a curious heretical literature, derived from Oriental sources; of phantastic Apocrypha and spurious Gospels, as well as of works of Oriental magic, which, disseminated by the more corrupt adherents of the sect, entered into the mediæval mythology of the West, and have still left their traces on its folklore as well as on that of the Russians, Bulgarians, and Serbs. Jireček cites, among other such works, the favourite Bulgarian legend of St. John Bogoslov, containing a vision of the Dies iræ, which was brought from Bulgaria in 1170 by Nazarius, bishop of the Upper Italian Patarenes, and translated by him into Latin. Another such work is the account of the wanderings of the Mother of God in hell; but perhaps the most interesting of all, and one which in its origin seems to be almost purely Sclavonic, is the account—reflecting the primitive Sclavonic custom of the ‘Pobratimstvo’—of how the Sirmian Emperor, Probus, made Christ his sworn brother.
[50] Radulphi de Coggeshale, Chronicon Anglicanum (in the Rolls Series, p. 121, &c.) The name ‘Publicani,’ by which the Essex chronicler alludes to them, is a common name for the Bogomiles in the West, and is, of course, a corruption of Pauliciani, or, perhaps, of a Sclavonic form of that word. The heretics seem to have spread to England from Flanders, where they were much oppressed by the Count. From the fragmentary details which Ralph has given us, they seem to have preserved their Bogomilian faith in a very pure form. They believed in the Two Principles and the evilness of matter, rejected Purgatory, prayers for the dead, invocation of saints, infant baptism, and accepted no scriptures but the Gospels and Canonical Epistles. Some went so far as to charge them (as Euthymius had done long before) with praying to Lucifer in their subterranean meeting-houses. They were ‘rusticani,’ and therefore not amenable to the argument of authority; by which, I suppose, the preference of the early Protestants for the vulgar tongue is alluded to. They observed a vegetable diet, and condemned marriage. From a shameless relation of Gervase of Tilbury which Ralph reports, it appears that there were holy women of the sect under vows of perpetual chastity. Gervase himself, a clerk of the Archbishop of Rheims, coolly related to his monkish friend, who chronicled the story with pleasing gusto, how, having failed to seduce a beautiful country girl, he perceived her heresy, accused her successfully of being a ‘Publican’ before the Inquisition, and feasted his eyes with her dying agonies at the stake. Girl though she was, she died without a groan, ‘instar,’ as even the monk cannot refrain from adding, ‘martyrum Christi (sed dissimili causa) qui olim pro Christiana religione a paganis trucidabantur.’ The tragedy, even as told by Ralph, is of an intense pathos, and deserves immortalising. How beautiful is that innocence and how unutterable the villainy which provokes an under-current of humanity even in a monkish narrator! After relations like this, the conduct of Henry II. to the Oxford ‘Publicans’ will appear almost merciful: he merely gave orders that they should be branded on the forehead with a red-hot key and thrust forth from the city, and that nobody should give them food or shelter. The notices of the Publicani, Albigenses, and other Bogomilian sects who gained a footing in England, both by way of Flanders and Guienne, never seem to have attracted the attention they deserve from English historians. Yet the hatred born by the orthodox against these Bulgarian intruders has added a word of reproach to the language.
[51] Nor is this the place to enquire how far, in the Languedoc at all events, the spread of these doctrines may have been aided by survivals of an earlier Gnosticism. What, for example, became of those Gnostici who had established themselves in the end of the fourth century in Spain and parts of the south of Gaul? (See Sulpicius Severus, Sacræ Historiæ, lib. ii.)
[52] By means of two merchants of Zara, Matthew and Aristodius, who brought the Patarene doctrines from Bosnia to Spalato. Thomas Archidiaconus, c. 24, quoted in Wilkinson’s Dalmatia.
[53] With the exception of the Croats, who perhaps hardly came under the denomination of Balkan Sclaves.
[54] Hist. Maj. ad annum 1223 (Rolls Series, vol. iii. p. 78); and compare Ralph of Coggeshale’s account (Rolls Series, p. 195). Jireček (op. cit p. 214) refers to a diploma of Innocent IV. in 1244, which reveals an intercourse between Bosnia and the Waldenses he cites Palacky and Brandl in the Čas. matice moravské, 1, 2.
[55] His residence is fixed as ‘on the borders of the Hungarians and between the limits of Bulgaria, Croatia, and Dalmatia,’ which indicates the position of Bosnia with sufficient exactitude.
[56] The style of Bartholomew, the vicar of the Roman antipope, was, according to Matthew Paris, ‘servus servorum sanctæ fidei;’ according to Ralph of Coggeshale, ‘servus servorum hospitalis sanctæ fidei.’ Ralph writes ‘Poios’ instead of ‘Porlos.’
[57] Raynaldus, Annal. Eccles. sub anno 1233.
[58] The Prince himself is described as ‘King of the Ruthenians, and Ban of Sclavonia.’ See Farlati, op. cit. and Spicilegium Observationum Historico-Geographicarum de Bosniæ Regno, Lugd. Bat. 1737.